If I were the czar of higher education that is not explicitly vocational, I would require every undergraduate to study philosophy. And if I were both czar and czarina, I would require all students to take two philosophy courses — one in their first year and another just before graduation.
At first blush, that requirement may seem bizarre, especially coming from me. I am a psychologist and, more broadly, a social scientist — not a philosopher or a humanist. Even more deplorably, I have never taken a philosophy course myself.
TORONTO -- It is "unacceptable" for publicly funded Ontario colleges to operate campuses outside Canada that exclude women, the premier of Ontario said Friday when asked about two men-only schools in Saudi Arabia.
How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success.
Emerging research suggests that for students to fare better, they need to fail better. How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success, and the notion of resilience is increasingly prevalent in conversations about higher education. Resilience has a number of characteristics, including levels of persistence, effort, positive mindset,
motivation and self-regulation.
So how do we build resilience into our classrooms? Are there ways to embed resilience into the content we deliver? As a literature professor, I have recently reimagined my medieval romance course as a learning journey about resilience. My premise: chivalric quests can provide a valuable lens to understand the process of transformative learning and provide us with models for normalizing failure as a necessary condition of success.
Traditional pedagogy is premised on a belief that older generations teach younger generations how to learn. At this point in history, however, through their ubiquitous exposure to media, technology, and communication, younger generations understand contemporary forms of communication better and more tacitly than older generations. Yet schooling lags behind advances in communication and technologies, clinging to a concept that older generations still impart knowledge to prepare younger generations for the future. Jake Telluci (2007), a participant in our research study on marketplace production, articulated this discrepancy well, when he said, “It’s about when technology is in the hands of people, they will often just do things with it.” In this chapter, I argue that unveiling new media and digital technologies production practices exposes a logic and language that better serve as a contemporary model of learning. The process of adopting new media is iterative and cyclical in that meaning-makers pick up new media production practices, remix them, and make them their own. Forging a twenty-first century identity entails reappropriating practices and texts consumed on a daily basis.
Last week we reviewed the reappointment, tenure and promotion process. In this article, we will discuss strategies
for assembling your file for it.
The typical file should include a copy of your CV, a narrative and documents providing evidence of your accomplishments in the three areas of faculty work: teaching, research and scholarship, and service. Those three
components of the file should be tightly integrated to tell a compelling story about your accomplishments.
According to the Ministry Education-supported Student Transition Project, about 30,000 B.C. high school grads enrol in post-secondary institutions each year.
Of that number, 17 per cent eventually earn a bachelor’s degree and 21 per cent earn certificates or diplomas of one kind or another.
But post-secondary education, especially a university education, doesn’t come cheap and doesn’t always fulfil its promises.
University tuition and other costs, including books and living expenses, for a Canadian four-year university degree can average more than $60,000, according to BMO’s Wealth Institute report.
In the early 2000s, anyone learning about pedagogy might have encountered “learning styles,” a collection of theories that assert people learn differently, coupled with the advice to teach in ways that include visual, auditory, and/or kinesthetic learning.
Background: Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parentteacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the
expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching.
For the first time in many years I am teaching a freshman course, Introduction to Philosophy. The experience has been mostly good. I had been told that my freshman students would be apathetic, incurious, inattentive, unresponsive and frequently absent, and that they would exude an insufferable sense of entitlement. I am happy to say that this characterization was not true of most students. Still, some students are often absent, and others, even when present, are distracted or disengaged. Some have had to be cautioned that class is not their social hour and others reminded not to send text messages in class. I have had to tell these students that, unlike high school, they will not be sent to detention if they are found in the hall without a pass, and that they are free to leave if they are not interested. Actually, I doubt that the differences between
high school and university have ever been adequately explained to them, so, on the first class day
of next term, I will address my new freshmen as follows:
Welcome to higher education! If you want to be successful here you need to know a few things about how this place works. One of the main things you need to know is the difference between the instructors you will have here and
those you had before. Let me take a few minutes to explain this to you.
Not only are racial, sexual and gender minority groups more likely to be victims of sexual assault, students who consider their colleges inclusive and tolerant are less likely to be victims, two new complementary studies found.
Published recently in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Prevention Science, the studies reveal how populations with intersecting minority identities may be at greater risk of sexual assault, emphasizing the need for more sexual assault research and prevention and treatment programs that address specific marginalized groups.
One study, led by a team from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, was based on surveys from over 70,000 undergraduate students attending 120 higher education institutions between 2011 and 2013.
The team found that women were 150 percent more likely than men to be sexually assaulted, but that transgender people were at much greater risk -- 300 percent more likely than cisgender men to be sexually assaulted.
Rae Report (2005) recommendation:«…develop a
First-Generation Strategy that involves early outreach to students and ongoing supports to ensure success while they are enrolled».
The Education For Practice Institute led thedevelopment of the professional and practice-based education (P&PBE) standards for Charles Sturt University undergraduate and graduate entry courses in 2010. This exercise was conducted with
extensive consultation with the CSU community and led to the development of 70 standards based on the four aspects identified as influencing the quality of learning and teaching at course level: learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, course infrastructure at a local level, and infrastructure at the university level.
Academic work is often solitary, but succeeding in the professoriate arguably requires social acumen. So is that why gay men and women are disproportionately represented among academics? A new study investigating the phenomenon of “occupational segregation” argues that certain jobs -- including that of professor -- are particularly appealing to gay men and lesbians for these reasons.
Early in my career, I struggled to say no. I was asked to serve on committee after committee, to evaluate fistfuls of manuscripts and grants, and to perform dozens of other tasks, large and small. I said yes willy-nilly — often because of genuine interest, but other times out of a sense of guilt or obligation, and sometimes out of fear of reprisal if I refused.
But as I advanced in my career, the requests snowballed. Agreeing to do all of them — or even half of them — became mpossible. I needed to figure out when to say no, and how to do it artfully. Five principles have helped me learn what to say, and what not to say.
Volunteer someone else — strategically. Often when people ask you to do something, they don’t actually need you to do it. They just need the task done. Even more urgently, they need to complete the task of obtaining a commitment from someone to do it. At the moment of the "ask," they likely do not view you as the holder of unique talents or the only person who could possibly do this work. More likely, they see you as a potential checked box on their own to-do list.
It is all too common to see PhD students work themselves to the point of physical and mental illness in order to complete their studies. It is less common to see PhD students who feel that they are under such pressure that the only option is suicide. But it does happen. There is a culture of acceptance around mental health issues in academia – and this needs to change.
One night during the third year of my PhD program, I sat on my bed with a packet of tranquilizers and a bottle of vodka. I popped a few pills in my mouth and swigged out of the bottle, feeling them burn down my throat. Moments later, I realized I was making a terrible mistake. I stopped, trembling as I realized what I’d nearly done.
I called a friend and met her in a bar exactly halfway between my house and hers. That night changed things for both of us. She met the love of her life—the bartender, who she later married. And I decided I wanted to live. The morning after, I found a therapist and considered quitting my PhD.
Good boards ask good questions, and great boards ask great questions. The ability to ask meaningful questions is an important skill in the boardroom and fundamental to effective governance. Said the chairman of Bain & Company, Orit Gadiesh, in a 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, “The most distinguished board is useless and does a real disservice to the organization, in my view, if the people on it don’t ask the right questions. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing your job.”
A study presented Friday at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting shines some light on the way women are hired for top higher education leadership positions in searches involving third-party executive search firms.
For the study, Harvard Ph.D. student Jeraul C. Mackey obtained access to proprietary data from a search firm that remained anonymous. The data covered almost 500 searches over an eight-year period starting in 2009. Mackey ultimately analyzed a subset of the data covering 250 searches for two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions.
He was able to look at how women candidates fared at each stage of the recruitment process for upper-level positions, finding that women fared better as searches progressed. He was also able to examine recruiters’ preferences about women candidates, finding that the gender makeup of a recruitment team had no discernible effect on whether a search ultimately resulted in a woman being hired.
Colleges are feeling heat to prove that their students are learning. As a result, a growing number of colleges are
measuring intended “learning outcomes” as well as issuing grades. But fewer are using standardized tests than was the case a few years ago.
Those are findings of a new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The liberal education organization received responses from chief academic officers at 325 of its member institutions, including community colleges and four-year institutions (public and private as well as a couple of for-profits).
OCUFA has presented timely and thoughtful policy positions throughout its existence on a broad range of postsecondary and related issues. Of the issues gaining prominence with government and policymakers in the past decade, how Ontario's public postsecondary institutions relate, co-operate, and collaborate to present the best possible pathways for students to their desired postsecondary outcomes has become increasingly important.